S.A. (Simon) Speksnijder

Greeting and eating in Roman society, 80 B.C.–180 A.D. 

The project

On an average day in Late Republican or Early Imperial Rome, many visitors went to the houses of the elite and attended their morning greetings (salutationes) as an act of deference. Some elite hosts of  salutationes also went to the admissio at the imperial court to pay emperor their respects and to greet him with a kiss. In the evening, the elites joined the emperor at a formal banquet or hosted a dinner (cena or convivium) for friends and clients at their own house.

In my dissertation, I aim to study these greeting and eating practices as ‘social rituals’. Until now, these rituals have mostly been studied as venues that were fit to express social hierarchies. I will argue, firstly, that they did in fact much more than that: greeting and eating rituals functioned as venues and vehicles to (indeed) create, but also to strengthen, negotiate and even break social relations and hierarchies in the Roman world.  The rituals are studied as expressions of power from ‘above’ (the emperor and the senatorial/equestrian elite) as well as expressions of deference from ‘below’ (clients). For example, men of high social standing could exercise social control over those of lower social standing by either admitting or excluding the latter to take part in eating and greeting rituals, while those of lower standing could in turn negotiate their relatieve social position during these rituals. 

The proposed research will be emphatically diachronic. This concerns my second argument: I will show that the political transformations of the late first century B.C. (when the first emperor rose to power) influenced the social and cultural practices regarding eating and greeting rituals and vice versa. This led to both change and continuity: the new imperial greeting rituals and banquets heightened the status of the emperor, while the continuining salutationes or dinners of the elite were still instrumental in securing a high status and good office. 

Provisional outline

The dissertation consist of two parts, one on greeting and one on eating rituals. The first part will be devoted to the elite salutatio, the imperial salutatio and to kissing as an act of greeting. The second part on convivial practices includes case-studies on the distribution of food to clients by their patrons (the sportula), the Roman dinner or cena and banquets hosted by the emperor. Each part which will be diachronically subdivided, i.e. part 1.1 will deal with greeting rituals in the Late Republic and 1.2 on greeting rituals in the Early Empire.

Sources 

This project is emphatically interdisciplinary: both literary and material sources will be studied. Literary texts by Golden and Silver Age authors will be most significant. For the Republican period, Cicero (De Officiis and his letters) and the so-called Commentariolum Petitionis (on retinue and public display) are of vital importance. For the first century A.D., writings by Seneca (especially De Beneficiis), the letters of the younger Pliny and satires by Martial and Juvenal are crucial, the latter two authors for their views on the salutatio and patron-client relationships. Suetonius is the main source on emperors and their court and banquets. The number of relevant Greek sources is relatively limited, but Cassius Dio and Plutarch also provide a wealth of information.

There is an abundance of visual representations of cenae, mainly preserved on wall-paintings in houses in Pompeii and Herculaneum. For the salutatio, a study of houses (domus) is also important, as it was the social setting of the ritual. An assessment of the ‘physical space’ in which salutationes were held consists of a study of domus found in Italy (mostly Rome, but also Pompeii/Herculaneum) and the imperial residence on the Palatine hill. Although many works have been written on the social importance of houses, the salutatio has not been given due attention in this context.